Intel IDF Day 1 - Quad Core, Santa Rosa And More 120
MojoKid writes "From demos of the new Alan Wake game engine on
a 3.73GHz overclocked Quad-Core QX6700 to design showcases with a wafer of
80-core teraflop capable chips, Intel's IDF opening day was brimming with
tech-wonder from the company affectionately known as Chipzilla. Paul Otellini also showed pics
of upcoming fab facilities in Arizona (Fab 32) and Israel (Fab 28).
In total, Intel will have
three 45nm fabs by the end of next year at an
investment of about $9B, all targeted 45nm manufacturing processes. Finally, a
bevy of Quad-Core Kentsfield-based systems are shown here, with Dell and
Voodoo's offering looking especially swank."
Grr (Score:5, Funny)
All these years we all thought whats outside the processor that matters?
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When did it stop mattering, and why wasn't I told?
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Apparently he has not pulled his head out of his CPU long enough to tell what really matters.
Core 2 Challenge (Score:1, Troll)
The image says:
What is this challenge they speak of? I want a million dollars...
Re:Core 2 Challenge (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Core 2 Challenge (Score:5, Funny)
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Catchup again's Sun's 8 core UltraSparc T1 (Score:2)
Re:Catchup again's Sun's 8 core UltraSparc T1 (Score:5, Informative)
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I disagree. x86 is a tiny, tiny market. PowerPC and ARM are both much bigger. Not sure about SPARC, but it might be. Have you looked at mobile 'phones recently? They're out-selling x86 CPUs, and most have a PowerPC or ARM chip in them. Take a look at a modern BMW; it has 25 PowerPC-based computers on-board. The three next-generation consoles? All of them are PowerPC based.
We are coming to the end of the desktop computin
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Um, no. You might... MIGHT... be able to make that statement if there's ever a year in which the year-over-year growth of desktop PC sales (let alone usable installed base) decreases. For now, we appear to still be in the initial geometric expansion phase of desktop computing.
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And my single-threaded program runs 10x slower on a T1 than it does on a P4. I measured this myself.
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And by now it's way behind as AMD and Intel battle it out furiously.
Just look at Intel's new CPUs (which beat AMD's chips is many situations by 40-50% - AMDs chips beat Intel's old CPUs by a similar margin too ).
Show me a real world benchmark done by an independent party where the T1 does better.
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They're not quad-core though (Score:1, Interesting)
Core2Duo is neato, you can overclock them like mad and the ALU/FPU is very efficient. But let's not kid ourselves. dual-die is not the same thing as quad-core.
Tom
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Perhaps. Perhaps not. Being not an employee of Intel, nor privy to their private project roadmaps and internal engineering goals, I can't sa
linky on the 45nm quad core (Score:1)
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If any of this is true then it will be shown in benchmarks. Until then, the internal constructio
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Putting the same number of transistors on one die takes as much power as putting them on two dice. (Unless there is some law of semiconductors that I haven't heard of.) Also, yield is lower (thus cost is higher) on a larger die than on two smaller dice.
Don't you work for AMD? I guess your attitude is not a suprise.
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MCM isn't always so simple (Score:1)
All of this is implementation dependent. Did they do a true MCM with reduced driver sizes? What sort of package are they using? How is th
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As Intel Ceo said in the press sesion: "The initial (four-core chips) are multi-chip, but so what?" he said. "I think you guys are misreading the market (if you think customers care about that)."
First, the dual-die process takes more power
I will wait for their quad-core before judguing it. The first dual core Intel CPU was hot and slow because it was based in the presscot platform, not because it was dual-die. This "dual-die" quad core is based on the Core 2, which is a great platform, IMNSH
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The Core2 is a nice chip but two of them is really going to be pushing the memory bus. AMDs Hypertransport scales better than Intel's FSB. Not only that but do the math. Intel's quad core system is going to run twice has hot and use twice the power of the Core2. Why? because it is two of them.
The speed for watt and the speed for heat ratio will be worse than the Core2 because it will not be twice as fast. AMDs true quad core may very well bet Intel's two die solution. It
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Applying your logic: "AMD's quad-core systems are going to run x4 hotter and use 4x the power of a single opteron core. Why? Because there're four of them".
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The quad-core from AMD will be a real 4 core in a single die designed to fit in the 95W power enveloppe. Unlike Intel who designed a 65W processor and just pasted two of them on there.
Tom
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Intel on the other hand is just sticking two dies in a package. Each die will produce roughly the same heat and draw the same power as a single Core 2 chip since that is what they are.
Now when Intel goes for a die shrink it will also have a lower heat output as well as a true quad core cpu. The problem t
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The summary (Score:1)
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Seems 80 cores isn't enough to resist the /. effec (Score:1)
See...haha...pah, Mr. Intel, you fought vat your 80-cores could stand before me? Mwahaha.....behold, my invicible weapon, the slashdot....
Still, it'll be interesting to see how Intel markets this to the everyday Joe user. I mean, the whole HT thing was marketted as helping you to burn a CD while you watched a movie...wonder if they'll use the same line here.
"See, now you can burn *79 CDs* and watch 1 movie, all without breaking a sweat"...
Sure, if you pick up Process Explo
Re:Seems 80 cores isn't enough to resist the /. ef (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much all desktop apps can be split into two categories:
I recently found out about an interesting experiment Intel did a few years back. They have a full-system simulator that allows them to test various things easily. They modified it so that all CPU operations took zero (simulated) time to complete. This gave about a 2.5x speed improvement for most tasks, i.e. an infinitely fast CPU only gave a 2.5x speed boost to most tasks. It doesn't take a huge speed increase before you run out of CPU-limited things and start hitting memory, disk, and network bottlenecks.
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#2 includes web browsers now (mine spikes 100% frequently for Flash / embedded video / javascript on AJAX sites).
Also it includes chat programs (which include real time voice/video communciation), and others. Many people are finding their PCs too slow to do 'new' things with because those 'new' things are hard on the CPU.
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Your arguement is based on a faulty assumption - that is that the limiting factors will not change. Whilest it's true that something like a word processor is basically limited by the typing speed of the user and throwing CPU at it isn't going to do much, the idea that applications limited by, for example, memory bandwidth will end up in category 1 and stay there is flawed. Memory is gett
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1. Wait until it has enough data to do something.
2. Do it as quickly as possible.
3. Go back to step 1 until the web page is completely rendered.
The net effect is that if the web browser has the CPU to itself, it will be constantly spiking the CPU to 100% for short amounts of time. If you are doing something like requires a bit of CPU usage, like playing a game, you'll notice it skip and jitter when a webpage is loading.
Moving fast now, eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now they finally seem to have woken up and, by god, they are really moving now, aren't they. $9bn in 45nm fabs? A wafer of 80-core chips already? Speaking as a one-time AMD Fanboi, I have to say - the daddy is back.
(Let the flaming commence)
Fat, dumb, and happy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as it took America years to spin up properly, leveraging her resources, Intel now has come back to fight more prepared and ready for the long haul. The question that remains is, can AMD keep up with an Intel obviously aware of what the mission is?
I would hope that with AMDs recent acquisitions that they not only keep up but open some new areas
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Re:Moving fast now, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the time, the answer from Apple was "Intel showed us their future road-map, and we wanted on board."
Now we are starting to get a glimpse of what they were talking about.
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All other big companies (and even the small ones) that design CPUs are doing the same. Some even have a large head start (Sun with UltraSPARC T1). You need the interconnect too. Sun, IBM and AMD have that with Hypertransport (intel's work-a-like won't be out until 2008, a full 5 years behind AMD, and 12+ years behind Cray, Sun, IBM and SGI).
Don't forget software. The Solaris kernel has been there since Solaris 7 in the mid-late '90s (SGI Irix too). Linux is catching up on multithreding (2.4 kernels with NP
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Spoken like (the vast majority of Itanium critics) someone who has never even seen one, let alone tested it.
OK, I'll bite.
About 3 years ago at Linux Expo in London the Red Hat guys had an itanic workstation. It was turned off, because it had overheated. They'd put it away out of site and wouldn't let me see it. I wanted to try it out, to see how fast it was. No way.
The guy on the HP itanic stand was waxing lyrical about the "new" crossbar switch in the big iron machines. I pointed out that he was a deca
ChipZilla (Score:1, Funny)
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Dunno, maybe it has something to do with naming similarity to the friendly Mozilla [mozilla.com]?
Santa Rosa (Score:2)
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http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?page=3 &articleid=877&cid=9 [hothardware.com]
Go IDF! (Score:2)
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1) Going to cost WAY too much
2) Going to drive an SUV 2 miles to work, and slow down to 2mph on right-turns
3) Going to drink wine and believe that it's "high-class"
4) Going to pay >$1M for a house that's about 2 inches away from the next >$1M house
5) Going to hide from its own shadow because of the terrorists downtown (people with spiked hair)
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Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Otherwise you can compare the Asus product line and you'll see that the AM2 motherboards look a *lot* like the 939 motherboards. The only difference is hardware virt and the new type of memory.
(I've used both of the 6150 chip
I Was Just Starting To Like Intel Again! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Paul Otellini, Intel's president and CEO, kicked off this season's IDF by coining the phrase "It's what's inside that counts", and spoke about why processing power matters again"
But then this in another article covering the same event:
"Otellini briefly responded to concerns that Intel's first quad-core packages are simply "glued-together" dual-core processors while AMD is working on a native, single-die quad-core chip. "So what?," said Otellini, adding, "The public doesn't care what's inside a processor."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/26/intel_core_2_qu
In yet another article in Ars Technica we read that Intel is look to an 80 core chip. I like the Core 2 Duo a lot but I hope the Intel megahertz fixation isn't just going to become a "core" fixation .
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-784
Robert Moses built a lot of bridges and roads around New york hoping to relieve congestion but it had the counter-intuitive effect of creating more traffic. I hope all the increases in size and power of computers doesnt just bring more garbage. With all the legacy code bloat, and things like video cards that get hot as toasters and power supplies that waste energy (the Google thing) I think computing could use a few reductions instead of increases. In that regard it's nice to see the Core 2 Duo bring down the wattage.
"Core" fixation (Score:3, Interesting)
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"Only" 20 (Score:2)
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I would guess that this will first be seen in some type of add-on board with it's own local memory. I don't think FSB speeds are likely to increase enough in the next few years to keep this monster fed otherwise.
Hyper Transport (Score:1)
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Not really a contradiction (Score:2)
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True of course. When I first wrote post I was mindful of a recent Tom's Hardware review that had the quad core doubling up in watts used (compared to Core 2 Duo)and that will sell for around 1000 USD.
Core 2 Duo was such an exciting thing to see
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Additionally, it would be nice if we could get past the "My specular lighting and bump mapping is slightly better than yours" pissing contest that causes all these hardware upgrades. I'm perfectly happy playing System Shock 2 at upwards of 200 frames per second because it's an engrossing ga
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intel chips sets (Score:1)
This also shows up in the workstation / severs chips sets as well. Aka the power Mac g5 has more pci-e lanes then the Mac pro and it has less bandwidth in the chip set to chip set link.
Also looking at Motherboards form super micro
Dual AMD
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My understanding is that the nvidia chipsets only have 20 pcie channels, so when you have two x16 cards in there, it behaves as though those slots were x8s.
Still:
(1) at least the slots are there, which they aren't on intel based board
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NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 and 3050 56 lanes 12 links Flexible
NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 28 lanes 6 links Flexible
NVIDIA nForce Professional 3400 28 lanes 6 links Fixed
NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 and 2050 40 lanes 8 links Flexible
NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 20 lanes 4 links Flexible
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http://www.sudhian.com/ [sudhian.com]
nForce 550 - 20 lanes
nForce 570 - 20 lanes
nForce 570 SLI - 28 lanes
nForce 590 SLI - 46 lanes
WAIT a minute (Score:2)
You need a core just for IO! I'm using a dual core, and even its being pushed to its limits, I cant wait for a quad or dual quad core to actually make a system multi-tasking friendly.
BTW, This isnt a windows bashing comment, this happens in linux too...
100% from a Youtube video?!?! (Score:1)
Seriously though, I think this is just something that Intel marketing decided to spout out in the hopes that nobody would actually check.
I've got a laptop with a Turion ML-40 [2.2Ghz] (32bit WinXP), and I just tested this. Even with the CPU throttled down to 800Mhz, the youtube videos only used 50% CPU, not even enough to bump the processor up to the next speed step.
If Intel CPU's really pegged at 100% just to play a flash video that an 80
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+not a BeOS user, just tried it once
++Slashies!
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The what now? (Score:2)
ooohhhhhh...
aaahhhhh...
WTF!?
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I guess I was too subtile.
IDF????? (Score:1)
Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:1)
more cores vs memory bandwidth (Score:1)
As it stands, a Core2 is only marginally faster than a single core for the multithreaded scientific computations I work on. I would bet that a quad core would show little to no advantage over a dual core.
-Tom
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Headline good for a chuckle (Score:1, Troll)
Good for quantum system engineering (Score:1)
Intel is batting for the fences (Score:2, Interesting)
I was hoping to hear about a single die with cpu/northbridge/southbridge/gpu all integrated (and for mobile use)... that would certainly turn the
amd/ati (Score:1)
why should amd be concerned with intel building excellent workstation cpu's when they can (economically) build a portable, all-inclusive board with a high-end igp and swift dual-core cpu?
how much longer until we see dual-core gpu's that aren't two cards glued together?
if intel can't get well-coordinated with nvidia and amd offers i
'Coining' the phrase? (Score:2)
How the hell can someone claim a phrase is being coined when it's such a generic phrase used everywhere?
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swank
informal
[...]
noun - behaviour, talk, or display intended to impress others.
(www.askoxford.com)
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Frankly, I think you're the one who needs to "get a life".